Learning to live well in my place.

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WB: Window Poems: 13

Note: If you’re enjoying reading about my Camp Life, I would like to suggest you check out my friend Spence’s blog,Rediscover the Wild in Wilderness. He’s also living in a wall tent (see, I’m not the only crazy one!) though he’s doing it up in Thunder Bay!

The following poem comes from a book called Window Poems. It consists of a number of poems that Mr. Berry wrote in “The Camp,” a cabin on the Kentucky River. Berry had known this cabin for a long time, had grown up using it, and when he first married his wife Tanya, they returned there. The Camp was primitive, kerosene lanterns, butane stoves and an outhouse without a door (the door after all would ruin the view). Obviously, there is much about this lifestyle that I admire. The poems contained in this book were written as Berry looked out the window of The Camp at the river.

13. Sometimes he thinks the earth might be better without humans. He’s ashamed of that. It worries him, him being a human, and needing to think well of others in order to think well of himself. And there are a few he thinks well of, a few he loves as well as himself almost, and he would like to say better. But history is so largely unforgiveable. And not his mighty government wants to help everybody even if it has to kill them to do it–like the fellow in the story who helped his neighbor to Heaven: ‘I heard the Lord calling him, Judge, and I sent him on.’ According to the government everybody is just waiting to be given a chance to be like us. He can’t go along with that. Here is a thing, flesh of his flesh, that he hates. He would like a little assurance that no one will destroy the world for some good cause. Until he dies, he would like his life to pertain to the earth. But there is something in him that will wait, even while he protests, for things turn out as they will. Out of his window this morning he saw nine ducks in filght, and a hawk dive at his mate in delight. The day stands apart from the calendar. There is a will that receives it as enough. He is given a fragment of time in this fragment of the world. He likes it pretty well.